Against Dryness Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

Against DrynessPolemical Sketch

T rl E complaints which I wish to makeare concerned primarily with prose,not with poetry, and primarily with

novels, not with drama; and they are brief,simplified, abstract, and possibly insular.They are not to be construed as implyingany precise picture of "the function of thewriter." It is the function of the writer towrite the best book he knows how to write.These remarks have to do with the back-ground to present-day literature, in Liberaldemocracies in general and Wel-r’are States inparticular, in a sense in which this must bethe concern of any serious critic.

We live in a scientific and anti-meta-physical age in which the dogmas, images,and precepts of religion have lost much oftheir power. We have not recovered fromtwo wars and the experience of Hitler. Weare also the heirs of the Enlight.mment,Romanticism, and the Liberal tradition.These are the elements of our dilemma:whose chief feature, in my view, is that wehave been left with far too shallow andflimsy an idea of human personality.. I shallexplain this.

PHILOSOPHY, LIKE THE NEWSPAPERS, is boththe guide and the mirror of its age. Let uslook quickly at Anglo-Saxon philosophy andat French philosophy and see what pictureof human personality we can gain from thesetwo depositories of wisdom. Upon Anglo-Saxon philosophy the two most profound in-fluences have been Hume and Kant: and itis not difficult to see in the current philo-sophical conception of the person the workof these two great thinkers. This cor.ception

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consists in the joining of a materialisticbehaviourism with a dramatic view of theindividual as a solitary will. These subtlygive support to each other. From Humethrough Bertrand Russell, with friendly helpfrom mathematical logic and science, wederive the idea that reality is finally a quan-tity of material atoms and that significantdiscourse must relate itself directly or in-directly to reality so conceived. This posi-tion was most picturesquely summed up inWittgenstein’s Tractatus. Recent philosophy,especially the later work of Wittgenstein andthe work o£ Gilbert Ryle derivative there-from, alters this a little. The atomic Humianpicture is abandoned in favour of a type ofconceptual analysis (in many ways admir-able) which emphasises the structural depen-dence of concepts upon the public languagein which they are framed. This analysis hasimportant results in the philosophy of mind,where it issues in modified behaviourism.Roughly: my inner life, for me just as forothers, is identifiable as existing only throughthe application to it of public concepts, con-ce~ts which can only be constructed on theba]is of overt behaviour.

This is one side of the picture, the Humianand post-Humian side. On the other side, wederive from Kant, and also Hobbes andBentham through lohn Smart Mill, a pictureof the individual as a free rational will. Withthe removal of Kant’s metaphysical back-ground this individual is seen as alone. (Heis in a certain sense alone on Kant’s viewalso, that is: not confronted with real dis-similar others.) With the addition of someutiIitarian optimism he is seen as eminently

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Hgainst Drynesscducablc. With the addition of some modcrnpsychology hc is sccn as capable of self-knowledge by methods agreeable to scienceand common sense. So we have the modernman, as he appears in many recent works onethics and I believe also to a large extent inthe popular consciousness.

We meet, for instance, a refined picture ofthis man in Swart Hampshire’s book Thought.and Action. He is rational and totally freeexcept in so far as, in the most ordinary law-court and commonsensical sense, his degreeof self-awareness may vary. He is morallyspeaking monarch of all he surveys andtotally responsible for his actions. Nothingtranscends him. His moral language is apractical pointer, the instrument of hischoices, the indication of his preferences. Hisinner life is resolved into his acts and choices,and his beliefs, which are also acts, since abelief can only be identified through its ex-pression. His moral arguments are referencesto empirical facts backed up by decisions. Theonly moral word which he requires is "good"(or "right"), the word which expressesdecision. His rationality expresses itself inawareness of the facts, whether about theworld or about himself. The virtue which isfundamental to him is sincerity.

17and the virtues lies under suspicion ofmauvaise ]oi. Again the only real virtue issincerity. It is, I think, no accident that,however much philosophical and other criti-cism Sartre may receive, this powerfulpicture has caught our imagination. TheMarxist critics may plausibly claim that itrepresents the essence of the Liberal theoryof personality.

It will be pointed out that other pheno-menological theories (leaving aside Marx-ism) have attempted to do what Sartre hasfailed to do, and that there are notable philo-sophers who have offered a different pictureof the soul. Yes; yet from my own know-ledge of the scene I would doubt whetherany (non-Marxist) account of human per-sonality has yet emerged from phenomeno-logy which is fundamentally unlike the onewhich I have described and can vie with itin imaginative power. It may be said thatphilosophy cannot in fact produce such anaccount. I am not sure about this, nor is thislarge question my concern here. I expressmerely my belief that, for the Liberal world,philosophy is not in fact at present able tooffer us any other complete and powerfulpicture of the soul. I return now to Englandand the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

IF w ~ turn to French philosophy we maysee, at least in that section of it which has

most caught the popular imagination, I meanin the work of Jean Paul Sartre, essentiallythe same picture. It is interesting how ex-tremely Kantian this picture is, for allSartre’s indebtedness to Hegelian sources.Again, the individual is pictured as solitaryand totally free. There is no transcendentreality, there are no degrees of freedom. Onthe one hand there is the mass of psycho-logical desires and social habits and preju-dices, on the other hand there is the will.Certain dramas, more Hegelian in character,are of course enacted within the soul; butthe isolation of the will remains. Henceangoisse. Hence, too, the special anti-bourgeois flavour of Sartre’s philosophywhich makes it appeal to many intellectuals:the ordinary traditional picture of personality

TH~ WrL~,~r STAT~ has come about as aresult, largely, of socialist thinking andsocialist endeavour. It has seemed to bring acertain struggle to an end; and with thatending has come a lassitude about funda-mentals. If we compare the language of theoriginal Labour Party constitution with thatof its recent successor we see an impoverish-ment of thinking and language which istypical. The Welfare State is the reward of"empiricism in politics." It has representedto us a set of thoroughly desirable but limitedends, which could be conceived in non-theoretical terms; and in pursuing it, inallowing the idea of it to dominate the morenaturally theoretical wing of our politicalscene, we have to a large extent lost ourtheories. Our central conception is still adebilitated form of Mill’s equation: happi-ness equals freedom equals personality.


18There should have been a revoX againstutilitarianism; but for many reasons it hasnot taken place. In I9o 5 John MaynardKeynes and his friends welcomed the philo-sophy of G. E. Moore because Moore re-instated the concept of experience, Mooredirected attention away from the mechanicsof action and towards the inner life. ButMoore’s "experience" was too shallow a con-cept; and a scientific age with simple attain-able empirical aims has preferred, a morebehaviouristic philosophy.

Wr~^r ~AV~ wz x~osT HERE? And what have

we perhaps never had? We have suffered ageneral loss of concepts, the loss o~ a moraland political vocabulary. We no longer usea spread-out substantial picture of the mani-fold virtues of man and society. We nolonger see man against a background ofvalues, of realities, which transcend him. Wepicture man as a brave naked will sur-rounded by an easily comprehende:l empiri-cal world. For the hard idea of truth we havesubstituted a facile idea of sincerity. Whatwe have never had, of course, is a satisfactoryLiberal theory of personality, a theory ofman as free and separate and related to a richand complicated world from which, as amoral being, he has much to learn. We havebought the Liberal theory as i: stands,because we have wished to encourage peopleto think of themselves as free, at the cost ofsurrendering the background.

W E rt ^ v E never solved the problemsabout human personality posed by the

Enlightenment. Between the various con-cepts available to us the real question hasescaped: and now, in a curious way, ourpresent situation is analogous to an ~Sth-century one. We retain a rationalistic opti-mism about the beneficent results of educa-tion, or rather technology. We corrLbine thiswith a romantic conception of "the humancondition," a picture of the individual asstripped and solitary: a concepticn whichhas, since Hitler, gained a peculiar intensity.

The iSth century was an era of rational-istic allegories and moral tales. :[’he ~gth

Iris Murdochcentury (roughly) was the great era of thenovel; and the novel throve upon a dynamic:aaerging of the idea of person with the ideaof class. Because i9th-century society wasdynamic and interesting and because (to usea Marxist notion) the type and the individualcould there be seen as merged, the solutionof the i8th-century problem could be put off.~t has been put off till now. Now that thestructure of society is less interesting and lessalive than it was in the I9th century, andnow that Welfare economics have removedcertain incentives to thinking, and now thatthe values of science are so much taken forgranted, we confront in a particularly darkand confusing form a dilemma which hasbeen with us implicidy since the Enlighten-ment, or since the beginning, whereverexacdy one wishes to place it, of the modernLiberal world.

IF WE CONSIDER 2oth-century literature as

compared with x9th-century literature, wenotice certain significant contrasts. I saidthat, in a way, we were back in the ISthcentury, the era of rationalistic allegories andmoral tales, the era when the idea of humannature was unitary and single. The igth-century novel (I use these terms boldly androughly: of course there were exceptions)was not concerned with "the human con-dition," it was concerned with real variousindividuals struggling in society. The 2oth-century novel is usually either crystalline oriournalistic; that is, it is either a small quasi-allegorical obiect portraying the human con-dition and not containing "characters" inthe rgth-century sense, or else it is a largeshapeless quasi-documentary object, the de-generate descendant of the i9th-centurynovel, telling, with pale conventional char-acters, some straightforward story enlivenedwith empirical facts. Neither of these kindsof literature engages with the problem that Imentioned above.

It may readily be noted that if our prosefiction is either crystalline or iournalistic, thecrystalline works are usually the better ones."~hey are what the more serious writers wantto create. We may recall the ideal of "dry-


Against Drynesshess" which we associate with the symbolistmovement, with writers such as T. E.Hulme and T. S. Eliot, with Paul Valery,with Wittgenstein. This "dryness" (small-ness, clearness, self-containedness) is nemesis of Romanticism. Indeed it isRomanticism in a later phase. The pure,clean, self-contained "symbol," the exemplarincidentally of what Kant, ancestor of bothLiberalism and Romanticism, required art tobe, is the analogue of the lonely self-contained individual. It is what is left of theother-worldliness of Romanticism when the"messy" humanitarian and revolutionaryelements have spent their force. The tempta-tion of art, a temptation to which every workof art yields except the greatest ones, is toconsole. The modern writer, frightened oftechnology and (in England) abandoned philosophy and (in France) presented withsimplified dramatic theories, attempts to con-sole us by myths or by stories.

On the whole: his truth is sincerity and hisimagination is fantasy. Fantasy operates eitherwith shapeless day-dreams (the journalisticstory) or with small myths, toys, crystals.Each in his own way produces a sort of "dreamnecessity." Neither grapples with reality:hence "fantasy," not "imagination."

T rI ~. proper home of the sy~nbol, in the"symbolist" sense, is poetry. Even there

it may play an equivocal role since there issomething in symbolism which is inimical towords, out of which, we have been reminded,poems are constructed. Certainly the in-vasion of other areas by what I may call, forshort, "symbolist ideals," has helped tobring about a decline of prose. Eloquence isout of fashion; even "style," except in a veryaustere sense of this term, is out of fashion.

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilarenough as thinkers, both tend to undervalueprose and to deny it any imaginative func-tion. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposi-tion, it is essentially didactic, documentary,informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it isonly [aute de mieux written in words. The in-fluential modern stylist is Hemingway. It

19would be almost inconceivable now to writelike Landor. Most modern English novels in-deed are not written. One feels they could slipinto some other medium without much loss.It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irish-man like Beckett to animate prose languageinto an imaginative stuff in its own right.

TOLSTOY WHO SAID that art was an expressionof the religious perception of the age wasnearer the truth than Kant who saw it as theimagination in a frolic with the understand-ing. The connection between art and themoral life has languished because we arelosing our sense of form and structure in themoral world itself. Linguistic a.nd existential-ist behaviourism, our Romantic philosophy,has reduced our vocabulary and simplifiedand impoverished our view of the inner life.It is natural that a Liberal democratic societywill not be concerned with techniques ofimprovement, will deny that virtue is know-ledge, will emphasise choice at the expenseof vision; and a Welfare State will weakenthe incentives to investigate the bases of aLiberal democratic society. For political pur-poses we have been encouraged to think ofourselves as totally free and responsible,knowing everything we need to know forthe important purposes of life. But this isone of the things of which Hume said thatit may be true in politics but false in fact;and is it really true in politics? We need apost-Kantian unromantic Liberalism with adifferent image of freedom.

T r~ E technique of becoming free is moredifficult than John Stuart Mill imagined.

We need more concepts than our philoso-phies have furnished us with. We need tobe enabled to think in terms of degrees offreedom, and to picture, in a non-meta-physical, non-totalitarian, and non-religioussense, the transcendence of reality. A simple-minded faith in science, together with theassumption that we are all rational andtotally free, engenders a dangerous lack ofcuriosity about the real world, a failure toappreciate the difficulties of knowing it. Weneed to return from the selLcentred concept


2O Iris Murdochof sincerity to the other-centred c3ncept oftruth. We are not isolated free choosers,monarchs of all we survey, but benigl~tedcreatures sunk in a reality whose nature weare constantly and overwhelmingl) temptedto deform by fantasy. Our current oicture offreedom encourages a dream-like" facility;whereas what we require is a renewed senseof the difficulty and complexity of the morallife and the opacity of persons. We needmore concepts in terms of which to picturethe substance of our being; it is through anenriching and deepening of concepts thatmoral progress takes place. Simone Weil saidthat morality was a matter of attention not ofwill. We need a new vocabulary of attention.

IT iS r~r.R~, that literature is so important,especially since it has taken over so::ne of thetasks formerly performed by philosophy.Through literature we can re-discover a senseof the density of our lives. Literature canarm us against consolation and fantasy andcan help us to recover from the ailments ofRomanticism. If it can be szid to have atask, now, that surely is its task. But if it is toperform it, prose must recover its formerglory, eloquence and discourse must return.I would connect eloquence with the attemptto speak the truth. I think here of the workof Albert Camus. All his novels werewritten; but the last one, though less strikingand successful than the first two, seems tome to have been a more serious attempt uponthe truth: and illustrates what I mean byeloquence.

IX x s curious that modern literatu::e, whichis so much concerned with violence, con-

tains so few convincing pictures of evil.Our inability to imagine evil is a conse-

quence of the facile, dramatic and, in spiteof Hitler, optimistic picture of ourselves withwhich we work. Our difficulty about form,about images---our tendency to produceworks which are either crystalline or iour-nalistic--is a symptom of our situation. Formitself can be a temptation, making the workof art into a small myth which :is a self-contained and indeed self-satisfied it, dividual.

We need to turn our attention away fromthe consoling dream necessity of Romanti-cism, away from the dry symbol, the bogusindividual, the false whole, towards the realimpenetrable human person. That thisperson is substantial, impenetrable, in-dividual, indefinable, and valuable is after allthe fundamental tenet of Liberalism.

It is here, however much one may criticisethe emptiness of the Liberal idea of freedom,however much one may talk in terms ofrestoring a lost unity, that one is forever atodds with Marxism. Reality is not a givenwhole. An understanding of this, a respectfor the contingent, is essential to imaginationas opposed to fantasy. Our sense of form,which is an aspect of our desire for consola-tion, can be a danger to our sense of realityas a rich receding background. Against theconsolations of form, the clean crystallinework, the simplified fantasy-myth, we mustpit the destructive power of the now so un-fashionable naturalistic idea of character.

Real people are destructive of myth, contin-gency is destructive of fantasy and opens theway for imagination. Think of the Russians,those great masters of the contingent. Toomuch contingency of course may turn art intojournalism. But since reality is incomplete,art must not be too much afraid of incom-pleteness. Literature must always represent abattle between real people and images; andwhat it requires now is a .much stronger andmore complex conception of the former.

Ir~ Mo~ ar~n VOLmCS we have stripped our-selves of concepts. Literature, in curing itsown ills, can give us a new vocabulary ofexperience, and a truer picture of freedom.With this, renewing our sense of distance, wemay remind ourselves that art too lives in aregion where all human endeavour is failure.Perhaps only Shakespeare manages to createat the highest level both images and people;and even Hamlet looks second-rate comparedwith Lear. Only the very greatest art invigor-ates without consoling, and defeats ourattempts, in W. H. Auden’s words, to use itas magic.


Christopher Hollis

The Wind of Change

T H E F I R S T white sctdcrs came to theHighlands in ~9o4 and therefore anold man like Kungo could remember

a time before there was a white man in theland. He had seen the Scrkali, as theKikuyus called the British Government,come, and if he could only ma.nagc to livea few years longer, there seemed every like-lihood that he would see them go. The wholebusiness was turning out to bc that of butone long lifetime. Kungo sat outside histhingira--his bachelor’s hut--and watchedthe hot equatorial sun going down the sky.He had called to his senior wife to bringhim some beer. She made her beer out ofsugar-cane and he preferred her brew to thatof any of his other wives. She brought him acalabash and he sat drinking it, and as hedrank, he meditated. The memories of a lifecame back to him.

The first white men to come to Nanyukiwere the missionaries, and the first ofthem whom Kungo ever met was FatherMcCarthy. That was a very long time ago--more, far more, than a hundred seasons--for Kungo always reckoned his time by theseasons of six months, since the rains andthe crops come every six months. He did notreckon in years as the white men so absurdlydo. Kungo remembered Father McCarthywell--a tall, white old man with piercingeyes. He was a good man and a kind man,and he and his fellow priests had taughtKungo and the other tribesmen some lessonswhich they had been glad to learn. Theyhad shown them how they could plant theircrops and tend them so that the yield wouldbe increased. They hadcast a spell on thetsetse fly so that it did not eat their herdsand they could now drive their herds into

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districts where herds had never been able togo before. They had shown them how tobuild up their land on the hillsides in ter-races, so that the rain no longer washed alltheir soil away. All these were good lessons.Once when his first wife was ill, FatherMcCarthy had taken her to Nyeri to a bad-smelling house called a hospital, where awhite witch-doctor had cut her open with apanga and snatched out from her stomachthe devil by which she was bewitched within.He had then sown her up with a needle,and, after a time she had come back to himcured and able to bear more children. This,too, was a good thing to have done,and seemed to show that the whitewitch-doctors--their rnundumugu--had morepowerful spells than had the mundumuguof the Kikuyu. If so, it must be that theirGod was more powerful than the Kikuyu’sNgai, and indeed Kungo had for a timeaccepted the God of Father McCarthy--hadbecome a servant of the Bwana Jesus--andhad defied the old law of Ngai. It hadseemed to him clear when his wife cameback from the hospital that it was theChristian God who now sat on Kerinyaga inplace of Ngai. But in his old age he did notfeel so sure. A hyena had left its droppingsnear his thingira. He looked at them withdisgust and with terror. Father McCarthy,he well knew, would have said that a hyena’sdroppings were a hyena’s droppings andnothing more. But all the Kikuyu believethat there is a thahu--a curse--in a hyena’sdroppings. Would it not be as well to go tothe rnundurnugu, to kill a goat and get puri-fication from the thahu? He did not say thatthe Bwana Jesus was not powerful for evil,as Father McCarthy had taught. But was


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Against Dryness Iris Murdoch